Hey it's me Tyler. Both open earbuds are stylish. The color, the way it looks, it looks almost like a earring, you know, so I feel like it could go with anything. My style is very fun. I feel like I always look like I'm on holiday. I just really like playing around with it and tying it to the music. So yeah, I really feel like the music I'm making right now feels like a holiday, so I want to look like it too. Check out Bose.com for more. It took a lifetime to find the person you want to marry. Finding the perfect engagement ring is a lot easier. At bluenile.com you can find or design the ring you've always dreamed of with help from Blue Niles jewelry experts who are on hand 24/7 to answer questions and the ease and convenience of shopping online. For a limited time, get $50 off your purchase of $500 or more with CodeSpotify at bluenile.com. That's $50 off with CodeSpotify at bluenile.com. I'm Sandra, and I'm just the professional your small business was looking for. But you didn't hire me because you didn't use LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn has professionals you can't find anywhere else, including those who aren't actively looking for a new job, but might be open to the perfect role, like me. In a given month, over 70% of LinkedIn users don't visit other leading job sites. So if you're not looking on LinkedIn, you'll miss out on great candidates, like Sandra. Start hiring professionals like a professional. Post your free job on LinkedIn.com/qualify today. Welcome to another episode of New Books and Terrorism and Organized Crime. Today we have Ian Grillo, who is on the line from Mexico City. And we're talking about his new book El Narco, Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency. Hi Ian, how are you? I want to thank you. How are you doing? Good, good, good. We're over here in Brisbane from my side and you're in Mexico City. And this is probably the first time I've actually spoken to someone in Mexico City. So how is everything over there at the moment? I suppose we're going to really talk about that as we discuss the book. I'm sure when it's in the evening now, in the rainy season, a bit of a rainy day in Mexico City, would traffic kind of getting towards rush hour traffic time. So yeah, but yeah, all good. All good. We're having a wonderful Brisbane winters day where we're going to hit 27 degrees Celsius. So all good here as well. So Ian, let's start off just by if you could explain how you ended up in Mexico City, because as you can tell by your accent, you're obviously not from Mexico. And how you end up writing this book? Well, I'm originally from Brighton in the UK. I came to Mexico in 2000. I came to do journalism in Latin America, and I was very attracted to the Latin America. By the culture, and also seeing some of the movies from back in the 80s, like Salvador, and hearing about the coverage of the civil wars in Central America back in the 80s. When I came to Mexico in 2000s, a very different narrative, a very different set of events going on, we were talking about the emergence of democracy and all these countries, the military dictatorships, the end of guerrilla movements in this kind of 21st century end of history, new bright catheism around the world. And so I came to Mexico back in 2000 and then became interested in drug cartels in the drug trade, partly growing up in Brighton. England is a place with a very high consumption of drugs back in the 80s. There's a lot of heroin there, a lot of ecstasy in the 90s and cocaine and so forth. And knowing several young men or teenagers who died of heroin overdoses back then. So, rather than Mexico and Latin America, which were countries which produced them traffic drugs, I was very interested in this relationship between communities like where I came from, where there's a very high consumption of drugs and communities which were involved in trafficking and producing drugs. And it's very interesting to me this kind of international phenomenon. Part of the global trade, the kind of globalization is the drug trade. But it's among different countries and obviously all politics is local and politicians have struggled to really contain this. And as I covered this drug trade and started to look, you know, all of the tentacles to the places where drugs were first began, growing growners, opium poppies to make heroin, the meth labs, important ingredients, going to Colombia to look at the color cocaine produced, eventually meeting traffickers, meeting assassins, meeting criminal lawyers, working with drug traffickers and so forth. Getting close to the cartels. And as I was doing this, there became a real surge of violence from about 2006 onwards where President Felipe Galvarón took power and declared a national war or national offensive on drug cartels and sent 96,000 soldiers against them and 16,000 Marines and 39,000 federal police. And when you had these, you know, offensive armed forces, the cartels hit back. And the other said explosion of violence and really a low intensity war erupting in Mexico, which now has claimed more than 70,000 lives, as well as, as well as there being more than 20,000 cases that people have disappeared. So I was continuing to cover this and those big interests from many international news outlets from Australian TV to British TV to Japanese TV to all the big American networks and magazines and so forth. And often people end up coming to me to start to produce stuff with them and news reports, short documentaries and that kind of thing. And I realized that this story I couldn't cover or story I couldn't tell often in these short news reports in these short articles or even magazine articles. It was so big. And so I posed this book and Bloom's Berry, who are the same publishers who published Harry Potter, that picks up on this and bought the idea of supporting me to go ahead with this project, which, in fact, the book is actually called Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency is the US title. The Australian and the British title is actually an article that bloody rises Mexican drug cartels, but it was a different tape there and it was being published in Poland, in France. Italian rights have been sold and in many other markets, so like India and so forth of English-speaking markets. I mean, it's quite prestigious that you're on the same publisher as Harry Potter because the story that's in this book seems like a fantasy land for someone, certainly from a Western country like Australia or the United States. It's just so strange because we tell the listeners what you're actually covering here is not just the history. You're actually talking about the culture of what's going on in Mexico with this particular change in the last 10 years, or 20 years that we're talking about. Well, there's certainly been this massive change in Mexico, really, one key was the move in Mexico from a one-party state, which there was one party in power, the institution revolutionary party, from 1929 to 2000, and it ran at times every single state. And in its hey days, it had almost every single mayor in the country and the president's office. So really kind of one-party system compared to the Soviet Union in some ways, it was holding power, but also it was called by one Latin American Nobel Prize winner, Mado Vargas-Josa. It was dubbed the "perfect dictatorship" in that it could hold up the power, but still have elections every six years, maintain the facade of democracy, change the person at the top, and have quite a functional country in many ways. And there's a big change to a multi-party system, which we've had since 2000, where we were changing the presidency, and really since the late '90s, in various states, so you've got a system with all kinds of different power bases. And that's part really of tragically a similar thing happened when the Soviet Union collapsed. You started to get this great monolith of power collapse or broke down or fragmented. And within that many people who worked in security forces, or for the state, defected and started working for drug cartels, started working as mercenaries, and many things before being the realms of the state, like shaking down business, the state of force, so you know, it's right, you can always shake down a business for money. The cartels moved into that area as well. And they started really challenging police, challenging the army for the monopoly of violence in parts of the country, and really became kind of criminal warlords. And as well as that, as you pointed out, it was also kind of rising the culture of drug cartels, of drug traffickers, from our whole music genre, subsidized by drug cartels, and literally they pay for these songs to be made, called "Naka Ballots, Drug Ballots", and also kind of a weird religion or quasi-religious beliefs funded as well by drug cartels, something called "La Santa Muerte", which is the Holy Death, which is also venerated by some ordinary people, a kind of skull, skeletal, grim reaper figure, but many drug traffickers will venerate, as they refer to her, to another group, one group, called Familia, which was Ghana, who's founder, who's the maddest one, and Mass Loco, who wrote his own kind of bible, and was a kind of a preacher, as well as a drug trafficker. So some very strange changes in Mexican society, and like you say, the whole thing can be very surreal. Mexico is a very surreal country. Dalí Salvador Dalí was said to have said that when he came to Mexico, he didn't like it, because he was even more surreal than his paintings. So it's definitely a strange place for many people who live here, or from here, also find it quite a strange surreal place. The rise of the drug cartels, too, coincides with the fall of the drug cartels in Colombia, from your story as well. So the American pressure on Colombia pretty much creates a new market, or the opportunity for the Mexican cartels to pick up the slack from the Colombian cartels that's there, coming apart. Is that great? Yeah, this is exactly right. People, analysts in the drug trade, talk about the balloon effect, as the drug trade being like one big balloon, and when you put pressure on one part of the air, simply rushes somewhere else. And it's very true, when the Colombian, major Colombian cartels collapse in the 90s, with the killing of Pablo Escobar in 1993, and then the arrest of the leaves of the Cali cartel by 1997, Mexicans grew in power, and the big money from cocaine moved from Colombia to Mexico. So the Colombians became simply suppliers of the Mexicans. They would sell them the bricks, the kilo bricks of cocaine, for some $2,000 or $3,000, and the Mexicans were moved to the US, where it could be sold wholesale for some $30,000, and they sold in the street for some $100,000 or even more. And then the Colombians, in some ways, were happy to retreat from the business because the US would put in pressure on them, as you say, but also they saw the growing market in Europe. They thought, well, we could still unload this to the Mexicans for a couple of thousand dollars, and we can focus on Europe where we're getting paid in euros, and where the European demand for cocaine is. It's come to a roof, especially in England, Spain, and Italy. But of course, the market in Mexico, the production market, isn't just cocaine. It's a full suite of drugs, effectively. It's marijuana, it's meth, it's heroin as well. Yeah, that's correct. The big four drugs, marijuana, cocaine, crystal meth, and heroin are all handled by Mexican cartels. They buy the cocaine from the Colombians, or from other places in South America. They become massive producer of crystal meth, and this gets back into the balloon effect. Again, crystal meth used to be produced mainly in the United States itself, often by bike gangs and so forth, cooking it up in bathtubs or, you know, in these mobile places in the desert, like you see in Breaking Bad. But when there was laws in the United States to try and crack down on this, and crack down on the precursor ingredients, like sweat for drilling, these different chemicals they would buy into crystal meth. They started to come down, and those moved down to Mexico, and Mexico created these superlabs and import more around the world, these precursors, and have these massive superlabs where you see, you know, an industrial scale production of crystal meth. And heroin, again, as you said, has been produced for a long time, black, tart, and Mexican mild as it's known as. And marijuana is produced out of the colossal quantity as well. From, you know, large swathes of Mexico, you can see a big marijuana plantations. Yeah. So how about when we next moved to a quick scan of who the major groups are, and then talk about the plazas and the war over the access to the plazas, and what the plazas are I suppose to. Well, the major groups in Mexico. When you get deeper into the cartels, you can see them often in more as federations, rather than top down organizations. I think that's quite important. Often, you know, we think of a, or the way that the media often paid me at these cartels or the DA payments cartels trying to make their cases is like, you know, companies as we don't understand a company like, you know, a very top down company like Microsoft or something. But really, they're more federations, you often see, so you can often see that the ganks is one of like franchises of them and sharing resources and sharing kind of brand name. But in Mexico, now you have the two biggest groups, although the biggest group of all is the Cinelloa cartel, which is a big federation of gangsters and traffickers, assassins and so forth, with his roots, all the way back, almost 100 years. When the United States first started restricting Opium in 1914, there was hoping come from Cinelloa state in the northwest of Mexico to the US. So in some ways it's like Sicily, like Sicily is to the Italian organized crime so Cinelloa is the Mexican organized crime. And one of their top guys is Joachim El Chapo Guzman, who was for a while on the Forbes billionaire list at the rate of 1.00 billion dollars, although I am many others have serious doubts about their science for calculating that figure. And he's since been taken away from that book because they realized it was kind of bad science and maybe, morally, not a good idea to put drug traffickers on their list. And then on the other side you have a group called the Setas, which are very different, they're a much younger organization. They were founded in 1998 as a small group of them forces for other drug cartels, known as the Gulf Carter, but they groom grew, they were first founded by 14 former members of the Mexican military, who the defectors joined the cartel. They grew and grew and eventually broke away from the Gulf Carter between about 2007 and 2010. 2010 they finally cut the links and went to full scale war with the Gulf Carter and spread it like in a very startling way across Mexico into Central America plays like Guatemala. And as well as trafficking drugs, they did a huge amount of extortion, kidnapping, piracy, theft of oil, human smuggling, human trafficking, and all kinds of other crimes, and really raise the bar in terms of the violence. Was there a leader court recently? Yes, they lead a leader known as Z3, who's a leader for a long time the executioner was supposedly killed in October last year, although his body was then stolen back by his people, which then raises the big doubt for them. They have got the corpse. And then his second in command is right-hand man, or the total tenant known as Z40, Miga Trevino was arrested in July, and is now in prison awaiting trial in Mexico. Besides these two major groups, there's also another, depending on how you define cartels, another seven or so other important cartels in Mexico, including one which is getting a lot of attention is the Knights Templar cartel. This is strangely taking the name from the defenders of Jerusalem in the Crusades, it's kind of a category of knights, the Knights Templar who are big in moving crystal meth among things. You've also got other groups that still go whitest cartel, why not cartel, Gulf cartel, Beltran Labour Organization, a Jalisco new generation, the other important groups in parts of Mexico, with power, who have often deals with the stealer cartel or the settlers, or other complicated system of alliances spreading around the country. And what about the plazas? I mean, the plazas are the mechanism to get things into the United States or into Mexico from other places. Yeah, that's right. The term Plaza obviously is referring to a square and they love Plaza was used before to talk about the jurisdiction of a particular police command, the police command was have a federal police command would divide into the plazas of their particular jurisdictions. They're their plaza was quite now they were operating and then they got kind of expropriated by the drug cartels to be their own place they would control like what what cartel controls which plaza. And this is particularly important when you get to the US Mexico drug trade, what's been from the US Mexico drug trade as opposed to the drug trade male parts of the world. You have this real flashpoint of the border with where you have this 2000 mile border with almost all the drugs are passing through the United States. And you create a real bottleneck that are worth incredible amounts of money, billions of dollars. So where's the drug trade in many parts of the world could be very disparate and money is moving here and there and drugs are moving here and there are a strange kind of octopus. In the Mexico US trade, you have this flashpoint, a place like wireless, one, a novella or cities worth billions of dollars to drug traffickers. These plazas become places territories, which they fight over. Who can control the plaza, whoever can control that class that can control billions of dollars. And that pretty much leads into the major conversation everyone's having is the number of people who are dying over there at the moment, they were always hearing about worries but it's not just worries where the killing is taking place. So how big is this war that's going on, how many people are dying and what are they actually fighting over. Well, it's always difficult in any more than no real numbers of dead, and in particular in a conflict, like in Mexico where many people who deny there's an armed conflict going on says it's simply a criminal problem like the US suffered in the Bronx or whatever. But there's been reasonable counts done by both the media and the government intelligence services. They've from estimates and calculate the number of people who seem to be killed by either organized crime by the cartels, or what security forces fighting the cartel security forces the army, the federal police, the Marines have killed thousands of people as well. And you see that, you know, the Mexico before this virus exploded, there was only in 2007, about that 7000 murders in Mexico, and you compare that to 2011 for example about 27,000 in Mexico. So there was a huge increase. But some of the reasonable counts have counted around 60 to 70,000 people who have died in this cartel related violence in the last six years. But it's sort of like the death rate in Syria. It's quite amazing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, sure. I mean, serious happened to a company. Yes, certainly it's comparable to to many war zones around the world. Many wars that happened when declares and when the civil wars in Central America, it's not as intense as other wars as they know, high high intensity was to low intensity on conflict, which happens in certain parts of Mexico in certain times. So you still have in Mexico, a very, very situation. You have in Yucatan Peninsula, for example, in Yucatan State, which is close to where many people got holiday to Cancun and so forth. It has the same murder rate as Belgium. It has a fairly low murder rate. And really there's, you know, if you went to an armed conflict there, it makes me a city in the capital where I'm out now right now, you have a similar murder rate to Boston in the United States. It's not as bad as New Orleans, it's not as bad as Detroit. However, you still have, I mean, right now, Guerrero is a very bad state of Acapulco. You have an Enacapulco, one of the worst murder rates of any city in the world. I mean, it's, you know, murder rates that are extremely high, and still other places. And this is a violence moves around the flashpoint moves around the Mitchell can state, down where the bus stays. And it's a violence which often involves large armed groups who can have the armed groups of as many as 50 people, or in some firefights has been hundreds of people engaging the military. With large weapons too. Yeah, with the weaponry, the biggest killer in this conflict has been the automatic rifle, the AK-47, or all the versions of the Castico, also because of the AR-15. But as well as that many fragmentation grenades, and also grenade, rocket-propelled grenades, also being launched and used, a belt driven machine guns, 50 calibers, and that kind of thing. So, again, the kind of weaponry often used by insurgent forces, by guerrilla forces around the world, it's not so much airplanes and tanks fighting as these kind of small, guerrilla weapons being used. Yep, yep, but I think I'm going to spend the rest of the time talking about the really quite bizarre cultural aspects of this and how this has flowed out through the community. We'll start off with the narco ballads. I'd never seen one. I always assume they were very small-scale things, but I went to a lecture recently at a conference where a guy was playing a few, and they're very high quality production, some of them. Yeah, that's correct. Some of the fans are on major record labels in the United States, as well. Many of these groups are based in the U.S. now. Really? Yeah, in Los Angeles, it's a big place, a huge audience among Mexicans living in the U.S. and Mexican-Americans, mostly. So, the tradition of the ballad itself has historical roots in Mexico. You can take this back to the balladiers who told stories about the Mexican War of Independence, or later the Mexican Revolution, and very many famous ballads about the Mexican Revolution, about Pancho Bia, and many other part of these people who fought the Mexican Revolution. And the machine is a way of telling stories of folk web exchanging news, talking about figures, and what interesting music form, in that sense. In, there was one group at Los Tigas del Norte, one of the founders of this genre, who formed in the late '60s and in the early '70s, recorded recording ballads on vinyl, and kind of bringing in an electric bass, and kind of pumping drum, and kind of making this kind of new sound, which kind of defined really from them, the Corrido sound. And one of their first narco ballads was back in 1973, I believe, telling the story of a woman who carried some marijuana in car tires into the United States, and they had to shoot out when it was delivered. And then, later on, that battle came very popular, and later on, moving forward to the '90s, when you had things like hip hop in the United States, you started getting a much more radical drug-battered figures, like telling the Sanchez, who was more like the kind of two-factor core of drug batters, who was quite a crazy figure of being in prison, and even a concert in the United States. Somebody got a guy out and tried to shoot him, and he pulled out a gun and started firing back, and he shoots out a concert. He was basically murdered in Mexico, he's seen a lot of states, he's seen a lot, and he kind of defined the hardcore kind of gangster drug-battered sound. And then, moving on now, to the more recent conflict you've had, super hardcore bands, one of the people in the book, their name is El Groupo Cartel, listen to Laura. That's called the Cartel Group, and no difficulty guessing which cartel they're sympathetic to, and they're very high, very close. Cartels will actually pay these people to write songs about them, a gangster, so I want you to write a song about me. I write about how I'm a great drug trafficker, how I move loads of heroin, how I move loads of cocaine, how I make loads of money, how I've got loads of people to find more guns. And people will charge you $10,000 or $5,000 to write this song about you, and then these bands will often play their parties, play these lavish parties of drug traffickers, and as well as being still very popular with people around the country. Is it a fence? I mean, I personally don't think it's worth trying to censor the music, because there's an effort now to try and censor this music in Mexico. Very hard to put out on the radio. They recently find some promoters in Mexico for having a concert of narco corral. And I think trying to censor it is not necessarily the answer. I don't think censoring music will necessarily stop violence, I think the root cause can be found in other places. So, the support for it, is this very much like a Robin Hood type of thing? Yeah, that's certainly true. And that's a big theme I discuss a lot in the book, is how drug cartels are seen within these communities. And one truth, unfortunate truth is that too many people in these areas, they see drug trafficking and the cartels as being a career choice in life as being one of the options available to them. And some of these figures try and hold themselves up as being Robin Hood figures who are only taking drug money from the Americans, and they've given out presents to orphanages and this kind of thing, given kind of supporting charity. Some of that image has been stained in recent years with a level of violence that's happened. And people have started to realize, well, maybe they're not really rivals by the system as much as being oppressive criminal warlords in their own right. And they've started to become almost an authority themselves, but still they like to trade themselves or see themselves often as the kind of a desporado, if not the good guys, at least the kind of the kind of a lovable bag. And there is a drug market in Mexico, when there are local customers. There really is a growing drug market in Mexico. There's a lot of use of crack cocaine, a lot of use in heroin in certain parts. And it's crystal methicine parts and obviously a large use of marijuana. And so it is a growing market and use of drugs here as well. And that's going to, that has big implications for how to deal with drugs here in the future. Yeah, let's change to the religious side now you touched on it earlier, but there's the normal church religious process that's going on in the community. And then this brand new religious one you're talking about, the ones that are the religious justifications for some of the cartels. That's correct. Yeah, there's various strands of the narco religion, one in Cinello is this folk saint called Jesus. He's a folk saint who supposedly abandoned it, killed just before the outbreak of Mexican Revolution in 1909. And he has a shrine to him in the Cinello State capital, which many drug traffickers do venerate and many of them see him as a man of the people. And, you know, pray to him before trafficking over the border and kind of those many bad as well. Alluding to him talking about him as somebody brings wealth in terms of drugs. Then this is bigger, the Santa Muerta, the Holy Death, who's kind of a strange character. This female grim reaper often dressed up in elaborate clothes. And this became a really explosion of a folk interest in her of working class Mexicans having shrines, having symbols of the Holy Death Santa Muerta and many drug traffickers are among them. And people we've found shrines to the Santa Muerta in houses of drugs traffickers and sometimes the people who have been decapitating victims have been around her. So there's been a lot of attacks on her from the church, Catholic church. It's a heritage heresy to follow her. Yeah, I mean, the way the violence been expressed in Mexico has been particularly brutal and it's really caught the word of tension. There's been an enormous amount of decapitations, you know, some 400 a year in recent years. And the heads into nightclubs and restaurants. Yeah, exactly rolling heads into nightclubs and restaurants and leaving heads in ice boxes, chopping up bodies, cutting up face and so on to a soccer ball, all kinds of weird stuff. And part of this is a psychology of kind of so terror for the cartels and the soldiers of the cartels trying to control the classes trying to control the territories that they see the best way to try and strike terror at the population. Trying to show themselves being the most ruthless, most powerful group there. And if you strike terror to people there, they won't resist and you can try and effectively control the territory. And what's going to happen in the future? I mean, we're at this point now has been growing progressively for the last 20 years. Is it going to continue to grow or is there any action being taken by government to try and reduce it? Well, you've had a couple of things that have happened. What is this great military offensive by the government under the government on. Came to an end with the, with people in a political card on leaving office in December 2012. This party is kind of a candidate for his party. One third place in the election. So it's a very bad and the failure of the drug was part of that. And this new president came in that the PRI back in the assistant revolutionary party will best go for most of 20th century are back in power now. And they've now changed the discourse, changed the dialogue and say, Oh, now we want to just reduce violence, reduce extortion, use kidnapping. This whole idea of a war against the cartels is kind of come to an end. But they still face the daily reality of armed groups, one white cartels confronting the military over running towns. They're still keeping the military parts of the country. hadn't really got a great new idea on how to handle this. But we have seen it seems a kind of plateauing at least of the violence. We saw this explosion in a sharp increase increased the violence between 2007 and 2011, where every year it was like multiplying. And around 2011, you know, things were very scary. People didn't know where it was going. Now, it seems to have plateaued. It seems to have kind of leveled in most of the places of a very high level of violence, but it just stopped getting worse and worse. And the government is simply trying to contain it, trying to contain it in certain areas, and trying to stop it, saving the agenda of the whole country, trying to not talk about it too much, trying to change the media conversation. Another interesting thing coming up is, is there is a new, a new, a breath in the discussion about the war on drugs, which really started in November last year when Washington state. And Colorado in the United States legalized marijuana. And now we've got in the Uruguay, a whole country, which is poised to legalize marijuana. And perhaps this kind of domino effect, where a whole bunch of countries are going to start legalizing marijuana, first of all, and kind of a whole new discussion perhaps about the war on drugs. And about failures of the war on drugs and how the war on drugs has only led to drug wars. On the scale of Mexico has been one of the most brutal drug wars in history. This could be interesting discussion we're going to have, we haven't now, when they have that next few years, perhaps we're going to redefine the whole way we deal with drugs, narcotics, and find a way which works better and doesn't give billions of dollars to these extremely violent criminal kingdoms. So it's a problem that doesn't have an easy solution. It's not like we just haven't had the person with the political will to go and do this particular thing. There's no straightforward answer to the whole issue of the violence and the drugs in Mexico. There's no magic, but I personally think there's three areas we can focus on to try and move forward on these three main areas as internationally. One is, I think, a rethinking of the war on drugs, the legalization of marijuana, when it looks at how it can take more harder drugs through much better rehabilitation and this kind of thing. The second important thing is, how can we stop or how can we help communities that have been so marginalized in Mexico and I've interviewed some kids in the book, who commit murders for about $85 a murder. You've got to see a real degeneration of communities to allow this to happen. I know how somebody could take a human life for $85, teenagers who see nothing have gotten the opportunity to only the cartels come to them and offer them something. This is interesting projects has been around Latin America in Medellin, Colombia. There was a mayor there who tried to revive the city of Medellin, who said we've got to really improve the areas. The most beautiful buildings have to be built in the worst areas of the city. We've got to really try and you constantly abandon these communities. There's some interesting things of Palermo, Sicily, the mayor there on my house well about how you try and revive communities. So so many things present kind of social work needs to be done over a long time. And the third thing is, how do you build a justice system, which works. I mean, one of the reasons that cartels have killed thousands of thousands of people is because they get away with murder. You know, we saw some horrific things in a white is in 2010 there was more than 3000 homicides. And only about 5% of those were sold sold. Even then we don't really have to go to the right people. So one in 20. So, so 19 times they're getting away with murder. So when you have that happening, that's a real problem. So how can you build a justice system, which works for a rate half issue in Mexico. And a very tough between many countries around all these issues, I think in Mexico are important because these are that reflect many countries around the world in the Americas. And in Africa, in Western Europe, so Eastern Europe also in rich countries in rich countries also see problems as well with marginalization with drugs. We organize crime and so forth. I'm sure in Australia, in the United States and so forth. But how do you build a justice, which works, how can you have a rule of law, which works. And that's a real tough issue in many countries around the world. How can we have rule of law, which works in these places. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you've done all this work. You've written this book as you said at the beginning, you wrote it as an opportunity to put all these ideas together in one place. So you're planning to write another book or? I am. Yes. I'm working on a second book. Now I have another contract with the same publishers, again, with Harry Potter. And this is a look at the same issues again, but it's also expanding out. It's looking at some various case studies of organized crime groups who have become on like criminal warlords in a couple in Mexico, one in Jamaica. One in Brazil, one in Colombia, one in Central America, in El Salvador, Honduras, earlier, and looking at the other case studies and taking these ideas forward about the role of these groups in the 21st century. How come the Americas is the most violent, homicidal part of the world and what's led to those and what we do about it. Terrific. Look, I'd be very happy to talk to you again when that one comes out as well. So keep me informed on that. That'll be a pleasure. Yeah, definitely. Right. Okay. Ian Grille, I thank you very much for the interview. Thank you very much. [MUSIC]
Today I spoke to Ioan Grillo about his book El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency (Bloomsbury, 2012). This book is an excellent introduction to the state of conflict between drug cartels themselves, the government and the Mexican community. This is not an academic study of criminology. Ioan has reported from Mexico for many years and he has brought together his accumulated wisdom into this book. The final product provides the multi-dimensional story and analysis of the events in that country. He explains how external factors such as the war on drugs in Columbia and internal issues relating to the nature of governance in Mexico have influenced the current situation. But this is more than just a retelling of criminal activity. Ioan gives an insight into the social aspects of the drug culture including the glorification of the participants in popular music and the religious justifications used by some cartels. El Narco is a fascinating book that read to me like a sci-fi almost post-apocalyptic world that actually exists. It is hard for someone from a more stable Western environment to comprehend this alien culture. Having said that Ioan’s account is not a sensationalized account of the events in Mexico but more an empathic expose of a very violent and ungoverned part of the world. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in organized crime and the broader social context in which it operates.
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